New York: US President-Elect Donald Trump has named the Kolkata-born Jay Bhattacharya, who raised questions about Covid policies, to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the medical research powerhouse. Trump announced in November that he was “thrilled to nominate” him for the job of directing the “nation’s medical research and to make important discoveries that will improve health and save lives”.

Accepting the offer, Bhattacharya said on X: “We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!” The NIH, an agglomeration of 27 separate research organisations dealing with different diseases and health issues, has an annual budget of $48 billion.

Directorship of NIH is not a cabinet-level post, but would require Senate approval and have an enormous global impact because of the range of its research that has cascading effects around the world. Trump said that Bhattacharya would work with Health Secretary nominee Robert F Kennedy, Jr, to restore NIH “to a gold standard of medical research as they examine the underlying causes of, solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including a crisis of chronic illness and disease”.

Bhattacharya is a multi-disciplinary academic at Stanford University holding professorships in medicine, economics, and health professorship, holding a medical degree and a PhD in economics. He shot to national prominence during the Covid pandemic by questioning the prevalent orthodoxy of the government health establishment of imposing extended broad lockdowns to fight the disease and went head-to-head with Anthony Fauci, who was acclaimed as the architect of the official policy.

Bhattacharya has asserted that he was the victim of government censorship because Twitter placed him on its “Trends Blacklist” under official influence limiting his reach on the social media platform, now renamed X.

Trump noted in his post on Truth Social that Bhattacharya “is a co-author of The Great Barrington declaration, an alternative to lockdowns, proposed in October 2020”. Bhattacharya was one of the authors of the declaration, a statement co-signed by doctors, scientists, and researchers, that called for loosening the restrictions to release healthy young people from lockdowns through a policy of “focused protection” aimed at older people and those at greater risk.

The declaration said that this would allow them “normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk”. This played into the divide between the political establishments of the Democrats, who were for strict lockdowns, and Republicans. Some Republican-run states like Florida, which adopted aspects of the declaration, did not have significantly lower statistics than Democrat-run states like California that followed strict lockdowns while keeping school closures lower.

As the social and educational fallout of the lockdowns has emerged, some former government officials who advocated those policies like former NIH Director Francis Collins have conceded that their narrow focus on lockdowns may have been unfortunate.

While Kennedy opposes vaccinations, Bhattacharya does not. Kennedy advocates unorthodox treatments and theories, which have come under criticism, but his and Trump’s focus on chronic diseases has been praised by some critics.